The Ocean Race: 990 nautical miles to Cape Horn - Boris Herrmann reports
Tatjana Pokorny
· 24.03.2023
Team Malizia continues to keep Team Holcim at bay, Team Biotherm and the US team 11th Hour Racing follow. The Ocean Race fleet sails stoically towards Cape Horn in harsh conditions. Here, "Malizia - Seaexplorer" Boris Herrmann himself reports on the battle with the competition and the elements at the 50th parallel south.
By Boris Herrmann, 24 March, 7.20 pm:
"At the moment I'm on autopilot and drop out when the boat accelerates strongly and then luff up again. Normally the pilot's subtle settings take care of that, but right now it's more about the rough stuff. We have five or six metres of swell and 20 to 35 knots of gusty wind. We are travelling with a small gennaker, stay jib and two reefs in the main. It's grey, quite cold, you can see your breath in front of your mouth. It's hard to stay on your feet. The boat leaps and bobs uncomfortably. Because the wind is slowly shifting to the right, we sail a little against the wave.
The swell comes aggressively from the side."
We could sail much faster if we wanted to. We try to roughly match the speed of Holcim and simply load the boat as little as possible. More is always possible. But sometimes it rattles quite a bit and hits the waves. With the swell, which comes quite aggressively from the side, and the gusts. I've just had another gust of 36 knots of wind. The boat accelerates more than we want. That's why the sheets are quite fished. These are all parameters that could be done differently.
You could also tighten the sheets now. You would sail a little higher upwind. Then you could easily manage an average of 25 knots. We're trying to stabilise at 19 or 20 knots. It's not that easy to sail slowly. And constantly slow. As soon as you fall off and fiddle the sheets, the boat drops a bit, even from the apparent wind that it generates through its own airstream. Then it sometimes only travels at twelve or 15 knots and has to accelerate again. We try out a bit how to steer the boat through this swell.
We have now all got to know the shades of grey"
There are still about 990 nautical miles to Cape Horn. We expect a jibe in the next ten hours at the latest. Maybe even in four hours. We have set ourselves a specific true wind direction as our goal. As I said, the wind is shifting to the right at the moment. We are waiting for it to turn so far to the right that we can then sail on the other bow with wind from the left favourably to the east, east-northeast, towards southern Chile, in order to shimmy and position ourselves further east along the route. There is a little less swell and wind there. And we'll be able to achieve slightly better average speeds there.
It's relatively cheerless, even though now is the best time of day with the lightest shade of grey. We've all got to know the shades of grey well now. We've had little sun. Once briefly yesterday. Antoine timed his drone shoot perfectly for the sun. Otherwise, everything is grey in grey. The sea looks impressive: the big rollers, these big swells that roll in. Unfortunately, we hardly saw any albatrosses. The race goes on. It's a bit like this: Squeeze your arse cheeks together and get through it. It's a bit cheerless. You can see it in the expressions on their faces.
We still expect the wind to increase"
Rosie is always unaffected by the whole thing. You can see it in Antoine's face a little. Will goes about his business quite stoically. Likewise Nico. You won't notice much about me either. But I would like to be able to surf elegantly on a nice southern sea wave - without this painful bumping and bolting. Because our ship is very stiff. It goes through your bones. And I always suffer a little with the ship.
Otherwise we are fine. We still expect the wind to pick up. Exactly what the conditions will be like is not entirely clear. Will we get really heavy seas or not? I think it'll stay in the comfortable range. If it gets too much for us, we'll jibe away to the east. So, here comes another big squall and off we go. On that note: best wishes to Germany. Bye!"
